Climate scientists sounded the alarm last year that 2014 was on track to be the hottest year on record. The Japan Meteorological Agency, in fact, declared 2014 year the hottest on record, but only by only 0.05 degrees Celsius.

“The Great Pause is a growing embarrassment to those who had told us with ‘substantial confidence’ that the science was settled and the debate over,” writes Christopher Monckton, the 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley and a climate skeptic. ”Nature had other ideas.” Monckton, who has studied and written on global warming for years, went on to note:

Though approaching 70 mutually incompatible and more or less implausible excuses for the Pause are appearing in nervous reviewed journals and among proselytizing scientists, the possibility that the Pause is occurring because the computer models are simply wrong about the sensitivity of temperature to manmade greenhouse gases can no longer be dismissed, and is demonstrated in a major peer-reviewed paper published this month in the Orient’s leading science journal.

According to Monckton’s work, warming since 1900 has only been 0.8 degrees per century — well within what climate scientists consider the realm of natural variation. The United Nations’ climate arm, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), predicted in 1990 that the world would warm at a rate of 2.8 degrees per century.

But climate models have been “running hot” for years, and observed warming in the Earth’s climate has been much slower — at 1.4 degrees Celsius, according to Monckton. This is less than half the rate of warming initially predicted by the IPCC.

The slowdown in the rate of global warming is largely the result of the so-called “pause” in global temperature rises. The global temperature average has not seen a warming trend in the last 18 years and three months, according to satellite records. Even surface temperature data, however, shows a pause in warming for the last 10 to 15 years.

“The IPCC’s 4.8 Cº-by-2100 prediction is almost four times the observed real-world warming trend since we might in theory have begun influencing it in 1950,” Monckton writes, adding:

From September 2001 to November 2014, the warming trend on the mean of the five global-temperature datasets is nil. No warming for 13 years three months.

The pause in global warming has confounded climate scientists who have put forward dozens of potential explanations for why global temperatures have not risen in the last 18 years and three months.

The most prominent theory seems to be that natural ocean cycles have slowed the rate of warming, which could last another decade or so if such theories are correct.

But even as global warming skeptics point out that there has been no warming since the late 1990s, news reports have been popping up about record heat in some parts of the world.

Europe, for example, was the hottest it’s been in 500 years. Climate Central reports that in “Europe, nine of the 10 hottest years ever recorded have also all occurred since 2000. There hasn’t been an annual cold record across Europe since 1956.”

The U.K. had its hottest year on record, according to the Met Office. The U.K. Guardian notes the “average temperature for the year was 9.9C, some 1.1C above the long term average, and making it warmer than the previous record year of 2006.” The U.K. also had the fourth-wettest year on record since 1910.

Across the world, Australians saw another year of heat waves that smashed previous records. LiveScience reports the “country kicked off January with an extreme heat wave; temperatures soared higher than 120 F (49 C).”

This report, by Michael Bastasch, was cross-posted by arrangement with the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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